We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you tast… - Abena Busia

For some of us, she is a person who is a trailblazer and a visionary who has helped put Black women writers – particularly those writing out of Britain – on the map. She is visionary, she is feisty, and she has an acute sense of the politics of being and the politics of representation. Yet in all of that, her wit and her wisdom have brought to consciousness the place of those of us Black people of African descent growing up in England – the way we negotiate our identities, the way we negotiate the politics of space, the way we interact intergenerationally and between ourselves [which] has been, for some of us, the food of life.

Violence is both visible and invisible.

It was a good piece because it creates the atmosphere and the vision. Carole is very interesting, of course, because she is the woman of disguises. The woman who has a secret that she needs to [or] feels she needs to keep quiet about in order to negotiate. I love her mother who is like, “I am a Nigerian and so are you, and we’re not going to get past this, so let’s...” The scenes with her mother and the ways in which the mother helps her re-find herself by dealing with, who is the person that you’re going to marry. I will ask you now about the structure of this particular book and the multiple voices, the twelve different voices, all of whom are connected – some intimately, some tangentially.